Analysis: Do we still need a turnaround specialist to turn this economy around?

The drop in unemployment was good news for Obama and bad news for the GOP candidates. (AP Photo)

Numbers aren’t just numbers, and certainly not in an election year.

Last week the unemployment rate fell for the fifth consecutive month and is now down to 8.3 percent. That’s the lowest rate since February 2009, the first full month of Barack Obama’s presidency.

While this good economic news was met with applause across the United States, a small sliver of the population didn’t join the celebrations: the Republican presidential candidates.

In recent days, they’ve denied that there was good news, credited the free enterprise system and blamed President Obama that the numbers were not even better.

“Mr. President, we welcome any good news on the jobs front,” GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney declared. “But it is thanks to the innovation of the American people in the private sector and not to you.”

Romney, the former CEO of the takeover specialists Bain Capital, has fashioned himself an economic turnaround expert. So what does he do if the economy is already turning itself around without him?

Well, he sends his chief economic adviser to the national TV networks to question the validity of those rosy jobs numbers. Republican economist Glen Hubbard argued the same on ABC’s This Week that the reason the unemployment rate has fallen is because many people have given up on finding a job and has stopped looking, thereby disappearing from the unemployment statistics, not because they’ve found work.

That was Romney rival Newt Gingrich’s talking point, too.

“You cited going into the show today that unemployment has dropped,” he told NBC’s David Gregory. “Well, it has dropped. You know why it’s dropped? Because over 4 percent of the people who would be unemployed have quit looking for work. If we had the same participation rate we had a couple of years ago, we’d be at 12 or 13 percent unemployment. People just quit looking. That’s not a very positive sign for the economy. It’s actually a sign of weakness.”

If it’s a sign of weakness, that’s sure not what President Obama is saying.

“There are still far too many Americans who need a job,” he told an audience in Arlington, Va. “But the economy is growing stronger. The recovery is speeding up.”

Alan Kreuger, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said declining jobless rate is proof that the Obama administration’s economic policies are working.

“It’s critical that we continue the economic policies that are helping us to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the recession that began at the end of 2007,” he said.

One prominent White House watcher says that voters still are not convinced that the economy is safely on the road to recovery.

“Voters have to believe things are truly getting better,” University of Virginia government professor Larry J. Sabato told Texas on the Potomac. “After a three-year-long very bad economy, most people aren’t going to believe things are better without substantial, continuing proof.”

He said that it’s too early to predict the potential impact a drop in unemployment on the presidential election in November.

“It is far too soon to say,” Sabato said. “People who issue irrevocable analysis after one month’s data should be banned from this business. Elections are a mosaic, and all the pieces won’t be in place for the voters to judge until November.”

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